Doctrine Repository getEntityManager() does returns empty

Question

I have an application I am coding with Symfony2. I have created an Account entity and used the annotation to create a repository called AccountRepository Inside the AccountRepository object I have created a function to run some business logic that goes out to an outside vendor and creates a user at their site, and returns the information back to us so I can associate their user with our Account Entity. Part of creating that user includes sending over credit card token. They then return some limited credit card data I want to store and associate with our account so I have an entity AccountCard after creating the object and inserting the appropriate data, I am unable to request the entity manager from the repository and persist the AccountCard doing a print_r on the $em variable shows nothing, yet everything I've read tells me I should be able to do this. What am I doing wrong?

<?php

namespace Openbridge\CommonBundle\Entity\Repository;

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository;

use Openbridge\CommonBundle\Entity\Account as Account;
use Openbridge\CommonBundle\Entity\AccountCard as AccountCard;
use Openbridge\CommonBundle\Entity\AccountAddress as AccountAddress;

/**
 * AccountRepository
 *
 * This class was generated by the Doctrine ORM. Add your own custom
 * repository methods below.
 */
class AccountRepository extends EntityRepository
{
    public function __construct()
    {

    }

    function createVendorUser(Account $account, $userData = array())
    {
        // Request new user from vendor code here. (this works)

        $ac = new AccountCard();
        // setters for $ac data here.

        // Get entity manager
        $em = $this->getEntityManager();
        $em->persist($ac);
        $em->flush();
    }

Answer 1

You have to remove the constructor, because EntityRepository uses that to bind the dependencies to the class.